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And a bone collar.
Yes, that should do.
“The most vibrant blues.” I turned and strolled toward the doors, letting the surrounding room dissolve as I refashioned walls into chains. “You want to see the sky, little one? Then paint it onto the ceiling, for you’ll never see it again.”
Chapter8
Ada
Decorated with hundreds of fangs and the spindly bones of rodents, the bodice of my dress fanned out at the waist, letting an endless amount of white feathers cascade down the dais. When it came to my attire, Enosh spared no effort to make me look like a queen.
Aside from my collar.
That made me look like a prisoner, no matter how he’d tooled the thick ring of bone around my neck with images of birds he promised I would never see again.
Brush in hand, I dipped the fine bristles into a small jar of paint made from green pigment and, based on the nutty smell of it, linseed. Trailing it along the edge of the dais, I added another vine to the motive, winding all the way to—
Clank.
“Devil be damned, I’ll never reach the right side with how short he keeps my chain.” A tug on the collar to let some air to my skin, then I scooted back until the tense string of bone ringsclonkedto the ground. “Here. Take the brush and finish the vine.”
“Ach, lass, me fingers are too rotten to even clasp it well,” Orlaigh said, her hands a speckled green whereas her lips had gone a dark purple.
“One would think you deserve for him to freshen you up, given how you tattled on me.”
“Stopped ye from trying to run again and get us both into trouble,” she mumbled. “I had no other choice, lass.”
No, she hadn’t.
Orlaigh was nothing but a prisoner of a different kind. Whereas Enosh had chained me to his throne for my attempted escape, Orlaigh’s help very well could have earned the old woman to become the collar around my neck.
Or another face on the throne…
I looked up at the corpse woven into the bone. He looked back, his eyes milky-white, yet I sensed his chilling stare on me. As silent as the Pale Court, he observed me but never made a sound.
Probably because Enosh had removed the mouth of both, leaving nothing but the shift of a tongue behind dry, brown skin. Every now and then, he restored the corpses, only to let me watch them rot away again in what had to be eternal agony.
I tossed the brush onto the bed Enosh had made for me, like a roundish nest of bone beside his throne, the inside fluffed with fox pelts and feathers. “Who is he?”
Orlaigh glanced up from where she sat on the dais with a book on her lap. “Lord Tarnem.”
“What did he do?”
“Lured me Master into a trap. A valley surrounded by mountains, the ground so frozen, no bone made it to the surface to help him fight off the ambush. They cut down the few corpses he had with him for protection and captured him.”
Yet another tale proving to be too true for comfort, scraping away my thinning doubt of Enosh’s divinity. “Was fire involved?”
“Ach, lass, the flames could be seen from five towns away. Kept ’em chained to a pillar where they burned me Master for a fortnight.” A slow shake of her head. “Terrible thing, death by fire. But death never came for him while he screamed in pain; skin growing back one moment, only to char black again the next.”
“I had no idea he could feel pain.”
A discovery that should please me or, at the very least, give me a sense of comfort. Instead, my skin broke out in gooseflesh, my mind drifting to the distinct smell that followed Enosh around—like ash sprinkled over snow.
“Gods are not so different from us, lass,” she said. “Me Master suffers like any mortal, be it a battered head or a broken heart.”
“A broken heart?” That lured a scoff from me. “As if he has one.”
Orlaigh looked at mefrom a tilted head. “Is it so hard to believe that he loves and lusts like any man?”
